There is increasing emphasis on disease prevention, early detection and treatment, avoiding unnecessary treatment, timing of treatments, avoiding invasive procedures, and reducing costs. Significant investments are being made to accelerate discovery and use of biomarkers that effectively detect progressing cancer. However, assaying or testing for an individual biomarker is often not effective for detection of progressing cancer.
The use of screening blood tests, where multiple markers are tested, is becoming more prevalent and cost-effective. Screening for many conditions using blood from a single draw can reduce medical costs. The incremental cost of additional tests decreases if subsequent blood draws are not needed. A further means of reducing costs is to store blood for later testing if needed. New technology is also reducing the cost of specific tests.
There is a need in the art to extract additional information from a diagnostic test, whether it is a biomarker test or a series of biomarker tests, or a medical image. Novel methods and systems of extracting additional quantitative information for use by patients or physicians are increasingly desirable to reduce the cost of medical diagnostics and treatments and to improve the accuracy of diagnosis and efficacy of treatments.